The Old Wives' Tale eBook

and Constance could bring themselves to be deferential
and flattering to every customer that entered.
No, she did not understand it; but her mother (though
a proud woman) and Constance seemed to practise such
behaviour so naturally, so unquestioningly, that she
had never imparted to either of them her feelings;
she guessed that she would not be comprehended.
But long ago she had decided that she would never
“go into the shop.” She knew that
she would be expected to do something, and she had
fixed on teaching as the one possibility. These
decisions had formed part of her inner life for years
past. She had not mentioned them, being secretive
and scarcely anxious for unpleasantness. But
she had been slowly preparing herself to mention them.
The extraordinary announcement that she was to leave
school at the same time as Constance had taken her
unawares, before the preparations ripening in her mind
were complete—­before, as it were, she had
girded up her loins for the fray. She had been
caught unready, and the opposing forces had obtained
the advantage of her. But did they suppose she
was beaten?

No argument from her mother! No hearing, even!
Just a curt and haughty ‘Let me hear no more
of this’! And so the great desire of her
life, nourished year after year in her inmost bosom,
was to be flouted and sacrificed with a word!
Her mother did not appear ridiculous in the affair,
for her mother was a genuine power, commanding by
turns genuine love and genuine hate, and always, till
then, obedience and the respect of reason. It
was her father who appeared tragically ridiculous;
and, in turn, the whole movement against her grew
grotesque in its absurdity. Here was this antique
wreck, helpless, useless, powerless—­merely
pathetic —­actually thinking that he had
only to mumble in order to make her ‘understand’!
He knew nothing; he perceived nothing; he was a ferocious
egoist, like most bedridden invalids, out of touch
with life,—­and he thought himself justified
in making destinies, and capable of making them!
Sophia could not, perhaps, define the feelings which
overwhelmed her; but she was conscious of their tendency.
They aged her, by years. They aged her so that,
in a kind of momentary ecstasy of insight, she felt
older than her father himself.

“You will be a good girl,” he said.
“I’m sure o’ that.”

It was too painful. The grotesqueness of her
father’s complacency humiliated her past bearing.
She was humiliated, not for herself, but for him.
Singular creature! She ran out of the room.

Fortunately Constance was passing in the corridor,
otherwise Sophia had been found guilty of a great
breach of duty.

“Go to father,” she whispered hysterically
to Constance, and fled upwards to the second floor.